Gilberto Gil and Africa

The event sealed the fate of the region that would become South Africa. He makes a correlation between that era and the struggle against apartheid that embroiled the country in the 1980s, until Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994.

As Gil himself explains on his website, he was asked to write the reggae song Oração Pela Libertação da África do Sul "in response to an explicit request from the physicist Mário Schenberg, who wanted a song for and about South Africa."

Gil goes on to say: "I argued, 'We are holding protests, demonstrations, signing petitions against apartheid, and so on.' But he [Schenberg] said, 'That's not enough. We need a song.' So I wrote the song and dedicated it to him." 

But this is not the only example of Gilberto Gil's close ties with the African continent, which he describes on his Facebook page as being "the endless source of happiness and joy that Brazilians have in their blood."

...and of his place as a black man, a son of the African diaspora, and a descendant of enslaved kings.

"When I arrived in Africa and first came into contact with the full force of black culture, my feeling of belonging to that culture got stronger. And it made me want to revive that within myself," Gil explained to the Folha de São Paulo newspaper in 2017, on the 40th anniversary of Refavela's release.

Described by Gil as "a dignified and noble continent," Africa started to resonate more and more strongly within him as songs like Ilê Aiyê, Babá Alapalá, and Patuscada de Gandhi poured out of him, proving what he had said: this album was a fusion between an evermore Bahian Gil and the African diaspora.

The surveillance culture in the media at the time (and as always) expected Gil to take a more aggressive political stance on the dictatorship, and a more Black Panther approach to sensitive African and black issues.

With Refavela, Gil did manage to bring previously overlooked discussions about blackness in Brazilian culture to the fore. "There was a new discussion taking place about the importance of black culture in the world," Gilberto Gil explained in the documentary Refavela 40.

The documentary was directed by Mini Kerti and featured one of Gil's son, Bem Gil, as the interviewer.

In 1987, 10 years after releasing Refavela, Gil returned to Africa, this time leading a visit to Benin in his role as president of Salvador's Gregório de Mattos Foundation, a position akin to a municipal culture secretary. 

Among those on the trip were: Salvador's mayor at the time, Mário Kertész; the French photographer Pierre Verger...

The Argentina-born visual artist Carybé, who naturalized as a Brazilian and lived in Bahia; and Mãe (Mother) Stella de Oxóssi, a Candomblé priestess from the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá temple.

When he returned from this trip, Gilberto Gil set up Benin House (Casa do Benin) in Salvador's Pelourinho neighborhood. On display were pieces donated by the Benin government, as well as Verger's donated collection of 200 original pieces from the Bight of Benin...

...which the photographer had amassed during his trips to Africa. The museum was housed in a colonial mansion, converted by the architect Lina Bo Bardi.

It was Pierre Verger who took Gil back again to Africa, this time in the 1990s. This time, it was to shoot the 1998 documentary Pierre Verger: Mensageiro Entre Dois Mundos (Pierre Verger: Messenger Between Two Worlds). 

Directed by Lula Buarque de Hollanda, the film was narrated by Gil as he traveled around the same places that the French photographer Verger (also given the name Fatumbi) had visited on the continent, albeit this time without him. With Verger's journal under his arm...

...Gil made contact with the same people that the photographer had met and interacted with. Some scenes were shot in Salvador, where Verger lived until his death in 1996, two years before the film was released.